Doxie's been around for awhile, but the latest iteration of these portable scanners offer one of the easiest ways to digitize your life. They take up about as much room as two staplers, operate from anywhere (even without power), and even transfer your scans over Wi-Fi automatically.

How It Works

The original Doxie offered simple, portable scanning with software that made it easy to move those scans off the device and into all your favorite cloud and desktop applications. That long list included Evernote, Dropbox, HelloFax, Flickr, Tumblr, Basecamp, and more, along with any desktop app of your choice. All of that great stuff still exists, but the Doxie Go finally makes portable scanning something you can truly do from anywhere thanks to a built-in battery. You can scan in color or black and white (at 300 or 600 dpi) to Doxie's internal memory and transfer your scans over via USB whenever you're ready. Alternatively, you can insert a EyeFi SD card to automatically transfer those scans over Wi-Fi instead. We've always liked portable scanners, such as the previously mentionedFujitsu ScanSnap series ($200), but they were never truly portable because they required a constant power source and computer connectivity for full functionality. Doxie Go actually cuts the cables entirely, and that actually makes it possible to digitize any paper you've got from anywhere you are.

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The Good

When actually putting the Doxie go through its paces, it was very easy to set up. You just charge it, hook it up to the computer, set up your cloud accounts, and start scanning. The software reads Doxie's scans as soon as you plug it in and you can virtually staple any of the pages together to create a multi-page document. While Doxie scans to JPEG by default (its file structure is the same as a digital camera's and that's how your computer will see it) but the software allows you to export to multiple formats. When exporting to specific services, you'll get specific options for specific services. For example, Google Drive offers optical character recognition (OCR) so you can turn scanned pages into actual text documents (or just upload the scan as a PDF file). Everything works phenomenally well and makes portable scanning really simple.

The Bad

The primary downside shouldn't come as much of a surprise: it's the battery. It takes about three hours to charge and gets through about 100 scans. This limited time is reduced even more if you use an EyeFi card, as it requires battery power to operate as well. If you scan a lot of paper per day or have a poor memory for charging your gadgets, this is a problem. If not, you probably won't care. Also, if you have a USB charger handy you can just plug it in for big batches. Doxie actually makes a world power adapter for $10 for those traveling everywhere and scanning every piece of paper they get.

The Bottom Line

All in all, Doxie Go is the most hassle-free option we've seen for going paperless. Doxie Go offers more features than the competition for the same price ($200), and you can get a less-capable, battery-free version known as the Doxie One for $50 less. As noted in our gift guide, it's a solid choice for anyone looking to go paperless without pulling out their hair.